At best, the array of images above gives a modest overview of the styles of manuscript text decoration that can be found among the library's holdings. But really, this is just a sampling without too much in the way of cohesive storyline or connection between the works - apart from the writing script - in terms of location, era, scriptoria and copyists involved or background influences. Perhaps it might be said that the majority are religious in nature.

A wall of complexity meets even the most basic of background enquiries. The Slavic peoples inhabit lands stretching from the Balkans through Eastern Europe and on up to Western Russia. The cyrillic script (and its antecedents) provides the basic written units for a dozen or more related languages. The Balkan Slavs were inheritors of Byzantium culture, but Oriental and Scandinavian influences are also important. The knotwork decoration seen in many of the images above suggest a significant influence by (or, say, exchange with) the Celtic manuscript tradition (eg.). Factor in the relocation of manuscripts, the migrational patterns of people over centuries, wars, a thin record/colophon in relation to many of the Medieval Slavic and cyrillic manuscripts; and an interested casual observer, hoping for some overarching storyline about the background to this body of work, meets instead a veritable maze of possibilities. [trust that some of this is inaccurate]

Some of the sites I persused in my less than extensive travels (many of them fairly tangential):

¶ Over a year ago (!) I spent a lot of time splicing together screencaps of the manuscripts taken from the flash presentation software. Eventually I worked out how to locate the jpeg files. I contacted someone at the Serbian National Library who was kind enough to not only give permission for the images to be posted here, but also told me how to manipulate the URLs to get their largest image files (which are not linked from the site: email me if you really want to know how to find them).The site is easy enough to navigate, although it's fairly unique web architecture. You can load each collection in a flash or html page. When you choose and load a manuscript in the flash screen, click on 'book images' to get all the thumbnails. If you want to load the jpeg file of a manuscript page, click the print icon at the top and it will open another tab with the image.

Those are quite remarkable. I don't think I'd really ever seen illuminated materials in the Cyrillic script, although it seems as though surely I must have at some point. But also--besides the Celtic-like interlacing (which could also be compared a bit to medieval Islamic metalwork patterns)--I'm surprised how much these tend to have a color scheme favoring red and green.

Speaking of the Copts, I wonder whether there would be a more direct relationship here than on the Celts since, of course, Serbia is closer to North Africa...

Perhaps one of these days George Bain could be a feature too? I don't know what's online about his work, I just know his book on Celtic interlacing.

"A growing body of evidence suggests that contact between the Mediterranean and early Christian Britain was surprisingly frequent."

"What makes this link so intriguing is that Michelle Brown demonstrates convincingly how the same Coptic and Eastern Christian manuscripts that influenced the Lindisfarne Gospels also influenced the work of early Islamic painters and calligraphers."

Yes, unquestionably there was quite a bit of contact between the Mediterranean and early Christian Britain (there was Roman Britain, let's remember), but people from some parts of the Mediterranean traveled more. I never really run into anything about the Copts traveling, but I'm looking forward to reading the article. I think the basic thing for us to remember is that people clearly traveled much more than we were brought up to think was the case.

I realize that there were considerable differences in the price of pigments, but I was mentally comparing to the range of colors in other manuscripts of the general period, which tends to be extensive. If red and green were the most affordable pigments and show up heavily in Serbian manuscripts, that seems to argue for a considerable economic gap between Serbian patrons and patrons in many other parts of Europe. (Not that that would be so surprising.)

This is far too much for me! I´ve spend the very last night on this blog, forgetting that there are deadlines in the world outside. There is so much to learn from the old masters of book illustration! Thanks for reminding us all!P.